Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love

Entering Gravyland: Breaking Bonds and Reaffirming Connections

xiii Entering Gravyland Breaking Bonds and Reaffirming Connections If all my luck ran out tomorrow And I fell back to where I began With a spirit poor and a need to borrow I’ll know that who I was is who I am . . . All the rest is just like gravy on the table And I’ve poured and passed as long as I was able And I know it took some time to understand The rules of behaviour here in gravyland Here is gravyland. —JOH N G OR K A , “Gravyland” I N M I K E H UC K A BE E’S A DDR E S S to the 2008 Republican Convention, he told the story of a teacher who did not allow her students to have a desk until they could figure out “how to earn it.” After many days in which the students failed to provide the correct answer, the teacher finally relented. As military veterans carried the student desks in the classroom, she announced: “You don’t have to earn your desks . . . these guys already did.” Within the context of a national election, the story was intended to connect the goals of education with a love of country and support for military victories past and present. As part of a strategy to brand Democrats as weak on national defense and, potentially, socialist, Huckabee’s story was widely considered to be a success. I, too, want to tell a story about classroom desks, a tale about my attempt to engage students in the local social and political forces that earned them xiv | EN T ER I N G GR AV Y L A N D seats in the classroom. The story I want to tell, however, is markedly different from Huckabee’s. Rather than see members of the local community walk into the classroom, put a desk in place, and leave, I want to tell about classrooms where the community takes a seat and becomes part of the conversation —sharing their knowledge and unique historical perspectives. Rather than see the teacher as the locus of understanding, I want to speak about a classroom that understands the power of knowledge generated through dialogue with the larger community—a dialogue whose insights can support the goals of both a neighborhood and a university. Finally, I want to share classroom stories where students come to understand that the right to sit in a classroom is not just the result of war, but of peaceful civil disobedience, of community struggles to gain self-recognition, and of collective efforts to seek social justice. I am hardly alone in attempting to create such a classroom. The struggle to maintain the possibility of a progressive education during a period of conservative dominance transcends the particulars of my own teaching or personal experience. Over the past thirty years, university and community activists have made a consistent and collective effort to resist conservative attempts to reduce education to a diluted and restricted sense of national identity and purpose. National organizations such as Teachers for a Democratic Culture, think tanks such as Rethinking Schools, and individual battle zones such as the case of Ward Churchill have served as important nodal points in such efforts. Taken together, these struggles speak to the commitment of university, community, and public-school activists working to create a network of political, social, and curricular institutions that expand literacy practices in concert with progressive political action. Complementary to such national efforts are smaller and more local moments. Moments where faculty create service-learning classrooms that provide expertise to a neighborhood’s struggle against corporate attempts to build box stores or sewage-treatment plants (or other toxic enterprises) in their community. Moments where, against conservative visions of U.S. history, academic programs have created courses that attempt to develop innovative and inclusive senses of our national past. In one sense, then, I agree with Huckabee regarding the need to focus on such stories from our teaching, for I believe that by studying the contour and shape of the stories Entering Gravyland | xv that emerge from our classrooms, we can gain a better sense of the tactics and strategies required to create seats around a common table of knowledge and activism—even if the activism is pointed in a markedly different direction than Huckabee’s. It is for this reason that I use the pedagogical stories that emerge from my own classroom...